One on One Shownotes - Manager Tools...

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One on Ones

Manager Tools | One on Ones | © 2012 Manager Tools LLC | Page 1

[Blog Post]

Our recommendations for the single most effective management tool -‐ the one-‐on-‐one.

[Cast]

Anybody who's listened to Manager Tools for any length of time knows that One on

Ones is the most important things managers do. Managers are responsible for results

and retention, and we recommend One on Ones as the single most powerful thing we

know a manager can do to improve his relationship or her relationship with their

directs, which leads to better results. It's the most important thing we recommend. No

question.

1. What One on Ones Are

2. Why We Do One on Ones

3. How We Do One on Ones

a. When You Do One on Ones

b. What You Do During One on Ones

c. Where You Do One on Ones

1. What One on Ones Are. We've told many, many conferences over the years, and

many, many managers and executives that if there were only one thing we were forced

to teach to the rest of our lives to managers, it would be One on Ones. And we're the

guys you want to learn about One on Ones from, because we didn't like them. But, the

second rule of the Army is, if it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid.

Whether you like it or not, you're paid to be effective. If you're not doing One on Ones

now, the single most effective thing Manager Tools can recommend to improve the

results of you and your team, is to start meeting with them each regularly, weekly, for

a half hour. We call these meetings One on Ones.


2. Why We Do One on Ones. In order to get the most out of your people, in order to

close the gap between where they are, and what they're capable of, you have to know

each of your team members individually. The idea of fairness gets applied to

management inappropriately, because the implication is, I will manage all of my people

the same. That's a bad idea. Different people require different things from bosses. If I'm

a top performer, and you insist on treating me identically as your bottom performer, I'm

going to feel mistreated. Frankly, the bottom performer is too, if you treat him or her

the way you treat me, if I'm your top performer.

It's really very simple. Every person who works for you is an individual. It is not hard at

all to get to know the individual strengths and weakness of each of your people. If you

listen to managers, and you hear them talk about their teams, you can tell the

difference between an average or a poor manager, and a great manager pretty quickly.

Here's the way an average or a poor manager describes their team. "Oh Mike, I've got a

fine team of people. They're a bunch of good people. We work well together. I feel like

we've got our eye on the ball. Every once in a while things fall through the cracks, but

somebody picks it back up, and we achieve good numbers. Things are on track."

Here's what great managers sound like. "Well, Mike, I've got a great team. Robert, who

works for me, just is absolutely brilliant at financial stuff. He'll be CFO someday, no

question. Tara, who sits right next to him, knows our customers so well, that whenever

there's a problem, I just know I can turn to Tara. Gwen really, really understands the

operations side, in a way that sometimes even I don't."

Can you see the difference?

The great manager who knows what to assign to whom, what to expect from who, and

why they do what they do.


Effective managers encourage relationships. We're creating a supposition here, we're

positing that a better relationship will improve results. The question then becomes, how

do you get a relationship? You have one or two choices.

You can say, "I don't think relationships are that important, so I am not going to do One

on Ones." OK, that's fine. We hope you would get great results, we don't think you will.

Although if you don't do One on Ones and you have great relationships, we're OK with

that. We don't need you to do One on Ones, we need you to have great relationships

because that leads to great results.

You could also say “well, I don't know that relationships are all that important, but I'm

going to try it and see what happens.” Then you will become a believer as well. That's

what happened to Mark. He didn't believe they'd work. He started doing them and

begrudgingly got dragged kicking and screaming into, "these things really are going to

work."

The question becomes, How do you create a relationship with your directs?

The answer is to communicate regularly about issues of interest to the directs.

Here's what most managers do. On Monday or Tuesday they go up to somebody and

say, "Hey Bob, how was your weekend, wife kids good, everybody good, yeah, OK great,

where we are on project X?" Asking vague personal questions that clearly aren't the

most important thing in the world to you is not building a relationship. What you really

want to know is where we are in project X. Directs hate that. Or let's put it this way,

directs hate bosses who think that they are creating a relationship by doing that.

There is no other way to create a relationship with a direct than to sit down and spend

time with them. Now we know everybody is busy and we wish there were better way.

But if you want to have better relationship with your directs, you must communicate

regularly with them.


Most managers say they want a team feel, “I want everybody work for me to feel like a

part of a team.” [We generally write the word "team" in quotation marks, because this

is not really a team. Teams don't have bosses that can fire them. Directs draw a circle

around the team, and the boss is outside the circle.] Teams are built on trust. And how

do you build trust? It's easy with human beings -‐ you communicate. All human beings

evaluate your communication with them based on two factors, quantity and quality.

Quantity is how often you talk to me. You can measure who your best friend is just by

looking at your emails and voicemails, and texts and tweets, and so on.

The quality of someone's communication is measured by whether or not it is of value to

you. In order to be effective developing relationships with our directs, we need to spend

time communicating about things that are important to the direct.

3. How We Do One on Ones. A One on One is a half hour long weekly meeting with

every one of your directs, structured specifically based on an agenda with 10 minutes

for them, 10 minutes for you, 10 minutes to talk about the future. Every single week, no

matter what, with every single direct, half an hour long, scheduled on your calendar,

and rarely missed.

There are a lot of managers who sit down and talk their folks, but they don't have a

structure. The structure makes an enormous difference, but the real value is scheduling

it and doing it weekly.

The focus of the meeting is on the team member. It's not on you. It's not on your work.

This is what's going to drive you. If you sit down and say, "Look, before we start, give me

quick update on project X," you've just blown that One on One. You've blown it because

now it's about what you want to talk about. You're using your boss power, your role

power.


You should sit down and say, "OK, what's going on?" You don't talk about you in the

beginning. You don't talk about your work. You don't talk about your issues. It's not a

waterfall meeting, where you repeat what your boss has told you, the way your staff

meeting is.

[By the way, related to One on Ones, there are two meetings we recommend to every

manager every week. There's only two, that is a One on One with each of your directs

and then your staff meeting. One on Ones do not take the place of staff meeting or

team meeting or whatever you want to call it.]

We've had thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of managers doing

One on Ones for years now. What we've learned is the moment you start asking

questions, they're going to answer them, and it's going to become a dialog, and you are

going to take 20, 25 minutes. What's more, you're going to be violating the fundamental

reason the One on One exists, which is to give a platform to the direct to allow them to

communicate to you. It's not easy for a lot of managers to get. We promise that you

underestimate the extent to which you are the boss and you can do what you want and

your directs cannot.

We ask executives in conferences, "How many of you go down to your direct's cubes

when you need something?" And 90 plus percent of the time the direct says, "Yeah,

sure. If you need me, sure. What do you need?" Yet, when your directs come interrupt

you, you don't say, "Absolutely, I'm available 90% of the time." You have role power.

The role power matters. It's easy for a manager to walk down and tell people what he

wants, and they have to listen because he outranks them. We don't mean to overplay

role power, but it matters, and you have it if you're a manager.

If you're a manager, you have a big, fat, red sign on your forehead. It says, “watch out.

I'm your boss. I could fire you.” If you think, folks, that your directs are telling you

everything, you are smoking crack. They are not. Do you tell your boss everything? No?

Well, then your directs are probably just as smart as you. They're not telling you

everything.


It’s easy to communicate downward. It's much harder to communicate upward. If you

think going around and telling people hey, how's it going? Good weekend? Everything

good, kids good? Is building a relationship, you're crazy. It's not. That's not a

relationship. That's you being polite and attempting to dismiss some of your role power.

If you want to create a relationship you have to spend time on it. It's as simple as that.

One on Ones exist to create a space for your directs to come to you with things that are

of interest to them. One of the first things that happens when you start doing One on

Ones, weekly, half-‐hour scheduled meetings with all of your directs, is that you notice

that you get fewer questions during the week. Managers often come to us and say that

they feel like things are quieter. In fact, people just aren't coming to you with hundreds

of small questions because they know they can wait till the One on One.

If you don’t do One on Ones and your directs are asking you lots of questions, they are

probably making up things to ask you. They're asking you the question to get in front of

you because they want to have a relationship with you, and they don't feel like they do.

Our good friend Missy Porter noticed this. She held her One on Ones with her 20 directs

on Thursdays. She was worried that she would have less time to get her work done. But

she found that she got her Tuesdays back. Tuesdays freed up because she wasn't

meeting with everybody. She started working on her stuff on Tuesdays. That's how

powerful One on Ones can be.

a. When You Do One on Ones. There are two issues around when you have One

on Ones – one is about scheduling them, the other is about the frequency.

Scheduling. The most important thing about the interval of your One on Ones or

the timing or the scheduling of your One on Ones, is that they are scheduled.

We would rather you scheduled your One on Ones than you had One on Ones

almost every week that were unscheduled. The core of One on One value is

saying to your directs, "You're always going to have time with me. I'm always


going to be investing in the relationship." If you don't schedule your One on

Ones, you're saying to your people, "This might be important in a given week.

You might be important, the time with me might be valuable to me. I don't

know. Let's play fast and loose with it. Let's sort of play it by ear. We'll see how

things go."

The data on this are overwhelming. Managers who schedule the One on Ones

are 80 percent and above in terms of compliance for completing One on Ones.

Managers who don't tend to fall in the 50 percent range. Your directs know it.

Your directs try to get time on your calendar if you're not doing One on Ones,

and it's hard for them. They know that your schedule drives you. They know if

they have time on your calendar on a regular basis, that says something to them.

That says a ton more than, "I'm going to try to meet with you every week."

Because they know it's a pipe dream.

Every time you try something new and then you discard it in a month because

it's hard, because you haven't gotten over the McGuire Hump of the Horstman

Curve, and you're not in the land of milk and honey yet where you start getting

the rewards because everything's hard in the beginning. If you keep doing that,

pretty soon, you'll never get a significant change to happen because you will

have taught your people nothing is going to get done here that's new or

different because I'm going to try it. It's going to be hard. I'm going to fail.

They're just going to develop calluses to any kind of initiative you put in place,

whether its management related or not.

To your directs, you are the company. You speak for the company. It's part of

your role power. When the initiative comes from you and they can wait it out,

but when it comes from the company, they know they can't, you lose credibility.

You hurt the company in terms of your ability to carry the water for your boss or

her boss or whatever, when it comes to change and initiatives and new ideas.

You've got to schedule One on Ones.


There are some of you who claim that your schedule's too busy. Look, folks,

we've got to tell you something. You're not that busy. We know CEOs who are

doing One on Ones every week with all their directs. Some of them are hour

long.

If you don't schedule your One on Ones, you are going to be perceived as not

really believing it and making it one of many things that might be important. We

recommend you schedule them. We'll talk about how to schedule them at a

different time. But scheduled every single week with each one of your directs.

Now, here is a caveat to the scheduling bit. It doesn't matter that the One on

One actually happens in the time that it’s been scheduled. The scheduling of the

One on One sends a message that is different than and as important as, in a way,

as actually having the One on One. The scheduling says this is going to happen.

This is important. You're important.

Imagine you put a recurring meeting, folks, on your calendar that said One on

One with Beth. It's every week, and there's no end date to that recurring

calendar. Take a look at your calendar a month from now. What will be on your

calendar in the week? The one thing that will be on your calendar in a month,

unless you're a very senior executive, in which case you're scheduled months in

advance, the one thing on your calendar will be that One on One. Your directs

will know that. Everything will be scheduled around One on Ones. All the One on

Ones will have pride of place. Everything else will move around the One on Ones,

and your directs know that. It's a recurring meeting.

That said, calendars move around all the time. Things get changed, things get

trumped, cancellations happen, the technology goes down, whatever. You move

things around all the time. It’s easier to move something that’s already on the

calendar than to find time for something that isn’t on the calendar. You can

move your One on One.


If you manage your calendar effectively, you always have the right of first

refusal. If the CEO comes down and says I need you Tuesday at two o'clock, just

roll over. But if your peers say I need some time with you, don't give them the

time you have scheduled for your One on Ones. Having them on the calendar

means you're going to be reminded of it every week. If there's a conflict, and it's

a justifiable conflict, you can move it. It's more important to schedule it, even if

you move it around a lot, than it is to say, "I'm just going to not schedule it,

because it's going to be too hard. Calendars here are so terrible." If you tell

people you're not going to schedule it, they will read that as a lack of interest in

interest in continuing with it.

One thing that many of us have forgotten is that there are a lot of people who

need time to prepare for a meeting, even if it’s half an hour every week. They

don't feel comfortable if you walk up to their cube and say, "Listen, how about if

we do our One on One now?" They will say yes. But they're not saying yes to the

One on One. They're saying yes to their boss who has a role power. Who’s sign

says, "Watch out, I'm your boss. I could fire you." They want time with you, but

they're not ready. They're not pleased. They didn't have time to prep.

For half of the audience probably, time to prep is very important. If you don't

schedule them, and you just go talk to people, they're going to say yes, and the

meeting then will end up being about you. It starts out being convenient, it starts

out being at a time that's convenient for you, and it generally goes downhill from

there.

Weekly. This is another thing that's really, really important. If you're listening

and you're saying, "I can't do them weekly though. I'm going to do them

monthly." Don’t. You can’t create a relationship with another human being by

talking with them for 30 minutes, once a month. When directs do monthly One

on Ones, they hate them. The single biggest data point that we got back from


the various periodicities that we tried in One on Ones was whatever you do,

don't do monthly One on Ones.

Further, though, the responses we got said, "My monthly One on One with my

boss turned into a dog and pony show. I knew that he couldn't remember things

from three or four weeks ago so I felt like I had to prepare a little presentation."

Now it wasn't actually presented, but maybe it was a couple of pages of notes

about successes and failures or mostly just successes. That's a business meeting.

There's nothing wrong with it, and if you want to do that that's fine. Just don't

call it a One on One. Don't tell people you learned it from us, and don't think you

are building a relationship with your directs by meeting with them once a month.

It doesn't work.

Monthly One on Ones don't work. OK, but bi-‐weekly now. You really can't

develop the kind of relationship you want to develop if you are meeting every

other week. There are a couple of reasons for this. The biggest one is, think

about your calendar and about your life, folks. Think about how busy you are

today or how busy you were today if you are listening to this in the car going

home, or on the train going home. Ask yourself, "What's my calendar like

tomorrow?" You probably have a rough idea. You know you got a couple of

meetings. You're not sure about one meeting, but you're pretty sure you know,

and you kind of got it in your head the couple of things you want to work on that

aren't on your calendar. You might have an idea of what the next day and the

day after look like. But we’d be willing to bet that you have absolutely no idea for

a week and a half from now. We tend to live our lives in three to five, to seven

day rolling windows that we can keep in our short-‐term work memory. It's just

the nature of work.

If you are thinking in three to five day windows, things that are going to happen

two weeks from now are definitely on the back burner. A One on One that

happens every other week is always going to be on the back burner. What's

worse is that if you miss every other week, you start going once a month.


We respect where you are. We know many of you have difficult situations. If

you've got 30 directs, don't try to meet with them every week. If you have more

than ten directs, and you're a first time manager, go to every other week until

your schedule starts to tolerate that what, 12 directs, six half hours each week.

After you've mastered that, it may take your three, or four or five months, then

go to every week.

Mike was working at MCI when it was acquired by WorldCom and went through

the bankruptcy. He had ten directs at the time and was doing One on Ones for

30 minutes every week. So, he was spending five hours a week in One on Ones.

Then he started getting called into a lot of meetings around this bankruptcy. It

became a fairly stressful place to be obviously. He needed time and so he started

having One on Ones every other week to get five hours back. He felt like things

were good, relationships were established, and so they could tolerate going to

every other week. Within a couple of weeks, it just completely fell apart. Not

only did he not get five hours back, he ended up spending more time. When he

had weekly One on Ones, people weren’t interrupting him all the time. People

weren’t always trying to get his attention. All the time he had gotten back, all the

efficiencies, all the deep relationship that helped...the grease that made

everything work smooth just evaporated simply from going weekly to bi-‐weekly.

We don’t recommend it.

A relationship isn't something you have, it is an outshoot of the behavior. If you

change your behavior in a relationship, the relationship changes, the relationship

is not a thing, it is the behavior.

Let's talk further about scheduling and weekly, because scheduling and weekly

bothers people. We understand that. We've tried to give you a sense of why

scheduling and why weekly matter, but we need to address why it bothers you

and talk about how to handle this as a meeting.


We have another cast, with more guidance, which says One on Ones are

business meetings. They are meetings just like any other meeting. Things are

going to happen. You're going to have to change them. If, in fact, it were just a

run of the mill meeting, you would say OK, we'll get it next week. But that's not

the case with One on Ones. They are not run of the mill meetings.

We recommend that this be one of the most, if not the most, important

meeting you have every week. This is how you are going to manage, believe it or

not. It'll fundamentally transform your relationship with your directs, and you'll

start getting more out of them. You'll discover your life gets easier. That's the

common comment we get from people once they start doing One on Ones. “Oh,

I didn't really want to do it, but suddenly, a month or two in, wow, things are

way better”.

The meeting is important enough that when you get a challenge, you refuse

initially, and then maybe you get rolled over. When you get rolled over, then you

have to reschedule it. If a meeting is important and there is a scheduling

problem with the meeting, you will reschedule that meeting immediately.

Meetings that are important, you don't want to lose the opportunity. You don't

want to make it only harder a day later because peoples' calendars continue to

fill up all the time. You schedule it right at the moment. You say we've got a

conflict. We've got to reschedule, here are a couple of times, let's pick a time,

let's move it now.

We've also got to consider the weekly part. If you have a One on One on

Tuesday, and there's a conflict, you don't reschedule it for the following Monday.

You only have a week in which to do it. Don't reschedule a One on One for

sometime in the following week, to have no One on One in one week, and then

to have two the next week. That feels weird to the direct.

The other thing we recommend is when you get a conflict, let's say the conflict

happens on Monday, but the meeting's not until Wednesday. Schedule the One


on One for Tuesday. Move it forward. There's no law that says you have to move

a meeting back.

It's really important, it's rarely missed. It's simply a matter of saying this is the

most important meeting I have. I'm not going to miss it. I'm going to figure out

how to make it happen.

b. What You Do During One on Ones. The purpose of the One on One is to

develop a relationship. Folks sometimes think that developing a relationship

implies there ought not be a structure about that. The issue is that this is a

relationship meeting, but this is a business relationship. It's a professional

relationship. This relationship is being fostered in order to produce better

business results. This is still a business meeting, and so we do have an agenda.

What happens is managers say oh, yeah, we're just chatting. What most

managers don't realize is when you're chatting, you're doing most of the talking.

Or in the event that someone is a little bit uncomfortable with you yet, they

don't know if they're going to have to fill up the full 30 minutes. They don't think

they can fill up the full 30 minutes, and so they shut down almost completely. So

the boss fills it up.

When you say we're going to have a relationship meeting, but then it's easy for

you to talk and they're having trouble talking, and you end up sucking up all the

oxygen in the meeting, it's not a relationship meeting. It ceases to become one.

In fact, they're probably going to say I really don't like them, and I don't want to

have them anymore.

The Agenda. One on Ones have an agenda. In 30 minutes, the agenda is 10

minutes for them, 10 minutes for you, and 10 minutes left to talk about the

future.


They go first because if you went first, you would take 25 to 30 minutes. Or, after

the manager gets done taking his 10 or 15 minutes, the direct feels that the

manager has set the tone and the agenda for the meeting and they're supposed

to respond to what they just talked about in the next 15 minutes rather than

what was on their agenda. You must allow the direct to go first.

We have also learned, through trial and error, that Monday One on Ones are the

most likely to be hijacked by the boss. It's sort of a benign hijacking, but

nonetheless it serves a purpose in terms of an example of what not to do. You sit

down with your direct in a Monday One on One and you say, "Hey, good to see

you. How was your weekend?" At that moment, a totally reasonable question

you would ask a friend, a business associate, anybody, at that very moment, you

have hijacked the One on One. You have taken it away from what the direct

wanted to talk to you about.

We also recommend starting every One on One with the same question. Mike

uses “How’s it going?” He found that if he didn't ask the same question every

single time, his tendency would be to be to ask something he was thinking

about. To discipline himself, he developed a habit of saying the same thing. We

recommend you memorize your first question.

Make sure, however, you can that they get their time to talk first. Professionals

think about ways that things can be effective. They try them until they figure out

what's most effective, and then they deliver on that. If you’ve memorized your

first question, you're not worried about what question to ask. Then you're

turning it over to them and you're much more likely going to get the important

things to them first.

We recommend telling everyone in advance that you're going to do One on

Ones, and going through the agenda, so that you can educate them in your staff

meeting a couple of weeks before you start. There's a quote we mention many

times: "Never introduce a managerial change without first introducing that


managerial change." You're going to tell people, "This is the agenda, 10-‐10-‐10.

I'm going to turn to you, and I'm going to say, 'OK, how's it going?' and you've

got the floor. You can talk about anything you want. Work, puppies, rainbows,

family, weekend, politics, whatever. Talk about whatever you want, and I'll be

happy to chat with you during that time."

The agenda is 10-‐10-‐10. But let's remember something. The agenda always

serves the purpose of the meeting. It's never the other way around. The purpose

is not built for the agenda. The agenda is a tactic to preserve and protect the

strategy of building the relationship, building open, frequent communication

about this that are important to the direct and to you. That's why it exists. That's

the purpose, and the agenda serves it.

We do not want, particularly when you start your One on Ones, to strictly

enforce the agenda. If your directs were hesitant or you were hesitant about

starting One on Ones, and you started them, and at 10 minutes in, your direct is

still going 900 miles an hour, just thrilled that his boss is listening to him about

the problems he's facing, about the issues he's seeing, about things you don't

know that are going on in the team, whatever, and you cut them off at 10

minutes, you are putting the agenda above the purpose of the meeting.

When you start your One on Ones, it's entirely possible that when you turn it

over to them, they're going to start talking. They feel like somebody's starting to

let the air out of the balloon, and they just can't stop talking until the air is out of

their balloon. If they start talking and they're not done at 30 minutes, it's

because they've wanted to tell you stuff, and they didn't think you want to listen.

If your directs, in the beginning, are still talking at 10 minutes, let them continue.

Remember, you can talk to them any time you want. If they're still talking at 15

minutes, let them. If they're still talking at 29 minutes, you might want to ask

them to wrap up. But let them talk for 29 minutes for weeks. Let them have their

energy run its course.


We know most of you are worried, "I'm afraid my directs won't say anything."

That's not the bigger problem. The bigger problem is directs who say too much.

We promise you.

Address the issue. Let them talk for the full 30 minutes and then say, "Wow!

That was great! Unfortunately, we're out of time. I'd like to keep it shorter, but I

understand you want to talk, and so it's OK." In this case, because of role-‐power

differential, because it's about the relationship, because they've got all this stuff

to tell you, we allow the purpose of the meeting, relationship building, to trump

the agenda. We never do it the other way around.

Now, if they're still doing this after four One on Ones, which would be about a

month, then you could say, "Listen. We've been going 40 minutes or so, because

I've been kind of cutting you off at 30 minutes. I'd love it if we could start

whittling it down to you only taking 20 of the minutes." Just see if they can't do

that, and spend another month letting them struggle to get to 20 minutes. What

you do is, 20 minutes in, you say, "Hey, we're at 20 minutes. I just want to let

you know." Don't cut them off, just say, "We're at 20 minutes."

Then, if after another month, they have blown through the 20-‐minute reminder

you've given them, say, "OK. Look. I am going to start asking you to stop. I'm not

just going to tell you it's 20 minutes. I'm going to ask you to stop at 20 minutes,

just because this is relationship, I've got some stuff on my agenda that I want to

cover, and so I'm going to ask you to stop at 20 minutes." You do that for about a

month, they'll gradually get to 20 minutes.

Then after they get to 20 minutes, say, "I'd like us to get to 15 minutes." Give

them another month to wrestle themselves into 15 minutes. They'll do that for a

little while, and then gradually every once in a while you'll have a time where

they get to 10 minutes.


90 plus percent of the time it's going to be 15 minutes for them and 15 minutes

for you. In those rare instances, one out of every ten, or once a quarter, you

actually finish five minutes early, that's when you can talk about the future. Keep

that little ten minute wedge of the future in your head, and recognize that you

only have to talk about it once every 10, 20 weeks. Normally, they're going to be

15 minutes and 15 minutes.

10 minutes for them. They get to talk about whatever they want to talk about.

This is why we suggest a directionally neutral question to start off the meeting. If

you say, "Give me a quick update on what you're working on," you’ve just

skewed the meeting. What you're doing is asking the most vague and benign

question designed to send a clear message -‐ I'm turning it over to you. Trust us,

your directs will talk about what they want to talk about, and it will be different.

This is an important point. You want your One on Ones to feel different with

each of your directs, because each of your directs is different. The key is that we

manage individuals. We don't manage groups of folks. We have a relationship,

individual relationships with each person on our team. We don't manage our

team like a bunch of women if they all happen to be all women, or a bunch of

men, or millennial, or people above the age of 40. We treat and manage each

person as an individual. That is fundamental. You do that by having a

relationship with each of those folks.

In our experience, the 10 minutes most of the time is about work. It's about

business. That's what your relationship is rooted in, and folks want to talk about

business. Maybe they want to talk about their weekend, or they want to talk

about puppies and rainbows. What they want to talk about is important to them.

If you want trust, you're going to have to communicate. You're going to have to

communicate frequently about things that are important to the other person.

So, it is whatever the direct wants to talk about. One of your directs is going to

talk about puppies and rainbows. Another one of your directs is going to only


want to talk about work. But the fact is personal stuff matters. You want as full

an understanding of what your directs are going through as possible. If they

want to talk personal stuff, if they want to talk football from the weekend,

you're going to spend 10 or 15 minutes talking about football.

If you have somebody who works for you who wants to talk about hockey and

you're not a hockey fan, start looking at the sports pages. You need to pay

attention to hockey. You need to pay attention to their team. This is how we

build relationships. Now, we're not saying that you have to endorse everything

they do. But you have to listen, and you have to know, and you have to have a

sense of when things are going well, and when things are going poorly. Be

insightful enough to ask the right question when something isn't right. When

things are good, ask them what's going on. Because they have shared with you,

you'll be much better off in terms of being able to have a conversation.

All of your One on Ones are going to be different. Every single time. Mark and

Wendii always start with Wendii’s list. It's the list of things that Mark hasn't done

that Wendii’s going to ping him about. "Have you done this? What about that?

Did you call that person back? I'm waiting to hear back from you on this. What

about that? You didn't finish _ . What about this? What about that?" It makes

her feel fabulous that we get through the list and Mark commits. Knowing every

week that the list goes to zero, is fabulous.

Now, you might say, "Well, gee, that's not really building a relationship with

Wendii." Oh yes it is. That's very important to Wendii. Sometimes the list is

short, and sometimes she talks about other things. Sometimes she says, "I've got

to tell you about my folks." This is not always what Mark would do but we've got

to learn when it comes to relationships if we're always applying the phrase

"that's not what I would do" you're making it about you and not about a great

relationship. We recommend that you professionally love your directs, in the

sense that you're willing to listen to what's important to them.


10 Minutes For You. Now, when it gets to your 10 minutes, you get to talk about

what you want to talk about. We know you want to talk about work and you

want to talk about this direct's work that probably isn't done. That's OK. You can

have your list and ask all about project XYZ ABC all day long during your 10 or 15

minutes. There's nothing wrong with that. As long as you don't cause anything to

have your directs start only talking about work, you're fine.

Now let's say for the first two months your directs are telling you all about their

personal lives. You get some time at the end and you talk about work and then

suddenly you notice after two months they start coming in and they start giving

you project updates and so on. Now you have fewer questions to ask because

they're answering all your questions in advance.

At that point you'd have to say, "Quick time out here. I just want to mention

something. I know I ask about work. I'm not suggesting by me talking about work

that this is secretly a meeting about work. It's not. Talk about what you want to

talk about. Please don't talk about what you think I want to talk about, because

I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about during my 10 or 15 minutes."

The meeting is about encouraging effective relationships by frequent

communication, and communication includes stuff that's important to the direct.

For the majority of managers we know, they want to talk about work. If you're

really uncomfortable sharing your personal life, you don't have to. If you're a

manager and your directs know you have a family, and you never mention them,

that makes your directs wonder. They could think, either he's embarrassed

about them or he's sending me a message that I shouldn't be talking about mine.

But if you don't want to talk about your family, you don't have to, ever.

10 Minutes for the future. We said earlier that in 90 percent of One on Ones,

you won’t have time for this part. When managers start doing One on Ones, they

discover after three, four, five months, that they’re way more down in the

weeds. It only takes a half an hour, but they know a lot more about what's going


on day to day, week to week with their directs. But managers say they feel

further away from career planning discussions with their directs because they’re

actually managing their work now.

We recommend getting into the details. Trust us. You’re not micromanaging. If

every once and a while, you get in deep with one of your directs, that doesn't

make you a micromanager, that means you're micromanaging one small thing,

which is completely normal among the most effective managers and executives

in the world. The problem in the world is not micromanagement. The danger is

the absence of you managing people. Managing means knowing what the heck's

going on.

You're going to get much more down in the weeds, and yet, you still need to be

able to pick your head up and look ahead a little bit so that you don't get

surprised by a turn that a direct is going to make based on what they want to do

in the future. Now, you're going to be much better seeing and hearing and

knowing what it is your directs want to do, but that said, a simple thing we

recommend you do when you have a couple extra minutes, if you're going to

think about career planning, is you ask where do you see yourself in a year? It's a

$64,000 question.

It lifts the conversation right up out of the weeds and into the big picture stuff,

which you're obligated to do in terms of thinking about succession planning and

retention as a manager, for everybody. If they say I see myself right here, I like it

here, good. If they think well, I was actually thinking about broadening my

horizons, maybe looking at other opportunities here in the company, it's always

better to know that early. Maybe you need time to convince them to stay,

because you're going to promote them, or you have a better job in mind for

them working for you. Great. But you need to know, and so you ask the

question, hey, where do you see yourself in a year? Let's just take a minute and

talk about the future.


The other thing you do is coaching. Again, we've got a coaching model that only

takes three to four minutes a week, because the direct is doing their own self

development, and you are just supervising it. The coaching part of that future

would be asking them OK, where are you on your project to improve your skills

in X. What was due this week? What did you do? What didn't you do? Give them

some positive and negative feedback. Again, we have separate guidance for that.

Keep track of how well they're doing. The way you keep a project on time every

week is you ask are you on time? Have you done everything? If you haven't, why

haven't you? What's the new deadline going to be? Make sure you meet it.

c. Where You Do One on Ones. Let's start with the big picture answer to this

question.

First, don't do a One on One in public. One on Ones are like feedback in the

sense that they are for the private use of one individual. The One on One you're

having with one of your directs is for you and that one direct. Every one of your

One on Ones is going to be different depending upon the individuals. That's the

whole point of One on Ones, getting to know the individuals who work for you.

You couldn't do them in public. In other words, you couldn't conduct a One on

One in the middle of a meeting with other people there, that they could hear

you having your One on One.

Now, we're not suggesting there that we're going for secrecy. Public and private

exist on a spectrum. There are very few things, professionally, that are done in

complete privacy. Privacy implies you've got to have an office. You've got to be

able to close the door. Hypothetically, some people would say private means no

one can know who you're meeting with, which is just dumb. It's not going to

happen. This is a real world meeting. It's a business meeting. You're not trying to

hide the fact that you're meeting with somebody. It's like any other meeting.

You're not trying to hide who you're meeting with. Our guiding principle is you

can't do one in public, but you don't have to be completely private.


You could have a completely appropriate, totally professional, not in public, and

not also in private One on One in the middle of the cafeteria at 10 in the

morning. There's always a steady stream of people coming down to get coffee.

You could be sitting 15 feet from the center aisle, across the table from one

another or sitting down next to one another, and have a meeting that is in a

public space, but it's not a public meeting, in that everyone would know that

you're meeting with one person, and they're not invited to come sit down.

By the same token, while you're not in complete privacy, people can see that

you're meeting, and they know probably who you are and who your direct is,

you end up having a private conversation. Which is to say, no one else can

overhear you.

We don't recommend that you search for privacy. If you have an office, that's

the perfect spot to do it. We don't recommend you avoid your office simply

because it's your office. Your directs are not afraid of your office, they're afraid

of you. You don't have to close the door, either. Some people do and that's fine,

and you can leave the door open and that's fine as well.

Please, don't go to the direct’s office. Don't go from your office to their cube,

because one person going to six or seven or 10 different places doesn't make any

sense. It's much smarter to have six or seven or 10 people come to one place and

frankly it makes it much easier on you. You have multiple meetings like this, they

only have one. The logistics of getting out of your desk, out of your office and

going finding your directs just gets in the way, and just puts another hurdle, a

barrier, between you and the One on One.

If you have a cubicle it's probably a completely fine space in which to conduct a

One on One. When we're thinking cubes, we're thinking a three-‐sided workspace

that you have a desk and usually your computer is in the corner of the desk and

often there's a keyboard tray. Here's our rule about your cube, if you can

measure your cube and it's six feet wide or wider, and the walls on it are higher


than six to eight to 12 inches above the desk, in other words, if they're only six to

eight to 12 inches high then those really aren't walls. If you have walls that are

higher than that, and the width of your cube is more than six feet you can do a

One on One in that cube. Have your direct wheel a chair over, if you have an

extra chair, a folding chair, have them set it right down next to you, scoot over a

little bit, lower your voice and have a quiet conversation.

If you're having a quiet conversation there's usually enough ambient noise in

most work-‐places that you can have a private conversation by being masked by

the ambient noise, by keyboard sounds, and people moving around, and

printers, and fax machines and the hum of air conditioning and so on.

You can have One on Ones for one, two, three, four, five months in your cube

and gradually build up enough trust and relationship strength that they feel they

need to share with you something personal or embarrassing or they're worried

about -‐ maybe it's family, maybe it's health or sickness or something, or fear

about the organization or something. At that point, if they really need a space

other than your cube, they'll ask for it.

There are situations where a cubicle is not appropriate because it is too small. In

that case we recommend you find a public space like the cafeteria that's not too

far away, and sure, if you do them in the cafeteria and it's only 50 meters away

you could do two back-‐to-‐back, there wouldn't be any problem.

The moment you see the second person come in at the bottom of the hour or at

the top of the hour you say to the first person, "All right, we got to wrap up. The

next person is here." You certainly wouldn't want that first person to come walk

over and sit down and wait for you to finish simply because there are no doors in

the cafeteria where you're meeting.

Generally we find that directs are going to be very respectful of their peers' time

with you, because they want their peers to be respectful of their own time with


you during their One on Ones. That said, that all leads us to our next point, which

is we don't recommend that you schedule a shared resource like a conference

room, particularly if your boss owns the conference room, and you think that

just by getting on the calendar for months in advance by filling it up with all your

One on Ones, you have it.

You could once in a while go to Starbucks and have a cup of coffee, and the

ambient noise in most Starbucks is loud enough that you can sit side-‐by-‐side and

have a One on One, and have a very nice, longer than normal One on One. You

could start it on the walk down there if in fact you wanted to, and then take

notes afterwards to clean up.

You don't have to do it in the same place every time, you don't have to change it

every time either. We would generally recommend doing it where your desk is,

as long as it's not too public. By the way, if you have a cubicle as opposed to your

office, and you have people coming up, you can simply turn to them and say "I'm

in a One on One" and turn back and continue the conversation. You can tell your

directs, "if you see me in a One on One with one of your peers, don't even come

up to the desk, I'm going to send you away, check your calendar. If I'm in a One

on One I'm going to ignore you, and it's rude of you to stand there and wait for

me". You're the one that allows interruptions when you turn and have a

conversation; it's not appropriate, it's not reasonable, don't do it.

Distant Directs. For some, your directs might be across the country. In these

cases, you can hold your One on One over the phone.

That said, we're not going to tell you folks that a phone One on One is as good as

a face to face One on One, it's not. But the question is not "Is it as good as a face

to face One on One?" when you can't be face to face with your directs because

they're distant from you. The question is "is it better than nothing at all?"


Webcams and Skype are absolutely ubiquitous today. There are some firms that

ban them for security reasons and so on, but, frankly, those are less and less

common every day. Our recommendation is pretty simple. Use a webcam. Even

if somebody's at home. If they're driving, or if they're on the road, and they have

a laptop but it'll be hard to get good WiFi or the 3G connection that they have

with their little WiFi base station isn't enough, fine, then you could do it over the

phone. If they're traveling, you could easily wait until the evening, and do the

One on One when they're in the hotel room when they've got WiFi and you

could do Skype and you could see how they're doing.

It’s completely reasonable to use a webcam when you're at home and somebody

else is at work in a different time zone. We generally recommend that you find

time to do their One on One when they're at work. Yes, that means you may

have to be in the office at midnight, or up at your desk in your house at

midnight. That's far better than expecting them to do a One on One with their

kids running around at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock at night.

You can use the phone. You have to be more careful about interruptions because

people won't know that you're in a One on One when you're on the phone.

Then, lastly, we recommend you have access to any document any of your

directs are working on, relative to work, at any time. For distant people, that

usually means some sort of shared electronic document space. That makes One

on Ones, at a distance, a little bit closer to face-‐to-‐face One on Ones. They work

great. They're not perfect, but they work great, and we highly recommend them.

Wrap Up

1. What One on Ones Are

2. Why We Do One on Ones

3. How We Do One on Ones

a. When You Do One on Ones


b. What You Do During One on Ones

c. Where You Do One on Ones

The most powerful thing we've ever recommended to any manager in the world is to sit

down and talk to their folks on a weekly basis, regularly, like clockwork. Because, just

chatting with your folks periodically, is not a way to get to know them. It doesn't work.

The single most important thing you can do to improve your relationship and, therefore,

your results with your team is to get to know the strengths and weaknesses of

everybody who works for you as individuals, rather than as a group.

Folks, take it from Mike, who didn't used to do them, when you go to this you will never

look back. We guarantee it.

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